During the holidays, and especially in the preparations for the party, I longed for regular life to resume, but, now that it has, I find that I’m not in the mood for it. I’m not in the mood for much of anything, except, of course, reading, and on that front I’ve been blessed with a really magnificent read, Ben Fountain’s acclaimed novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. It’s both harrowing and impossible to put down, a waking nightmare of fraudulence, hypocrisy, and opportunism. It is also twisted and funny, and as pulsatingly vital as the America that it presents is bogus. As long as there are such novels, we need not abandon hope.

Billy Lynn is a smart but under-educated nineteen year-old from oil-patch Texas who enlists in the Army under duress, after a folly of adolescent chivalry reduces his options to that or prison. He has the good fortune, if that’s what it is, to be filmed as a hero by an embedded Fox News team, as a result of which he is brought back to the States for a “Victory tour.” War and the company of two wise, older soldiers (not much older!) have among them torn the scales from Billy’s eyes, as one used to say, and he sees his homeland with a zero-degree clarity that transcends — or subtends — all irony. He has the decency to expect that President Bush and Vice President Cheney, when he is introduced to them with his fellow team members, will be embarrassed about the course of the war, and he is shocked by their jocularity. I must admit that I was shocked by his shock — surely he would have known how Bush behaved as a matter of course. But he didn’t know; perhaps most Americans didn’t. Fountain is particularly acute when it comes to the metastatizing effect of media attention, and even better at making Billy’s resistance plausible. More anon.

***

In the last phases of party preparation, I slipped Broadcast News into the DVD boombox. Although made in the late Eighties, it looks about four or five years older now, the women’s fashions and hairdos (all shoulder pads and big hair) wildly dated. I wondered if the story has dated as well. I can easily imagine that younger viewers might wonder what all the fuss is about, given the subsequent ascendancy of Fox News. At a sharpish moment in the movie, Albert Brooks tries to convince Holly Hunter that William Hurt is the devil. The devil isn’t going to be scary and ugly, he tells her; he’s going to be nice and kind, and never hurt a living thing — as long as he can steadily lower everyone’s standards. Happily, this prediction turned out to be incorrect; there is nothing nice and kind about Fox News; only people who think that a locker room is a fun place to be could possible call it “nice,” and as for kindness, that virtue would be openly disavowed by the network itself. What keeps Broadcast News fresh is a more ageless story, even if it’s one that doesn’t get told very often, about the ethics of intelligence.

Both of the candidates for the heroine’s affection — Aaron (Albert Brooks) and Tom (William Hurt) are morally flawed men. Aaron, perhaps in keeping with his ideas about Satan, is not a nice person at all. He’s a jerk, frankly, unable to subordinate the display of his IQ to the emotional comfort of those around him. (And yet James Brooks’s screenplay takes great pains to rule out Asperger’s as an explanation, ante lettera.) Tom, in contrast, is a deeply empathetic man, but he is too willing to be dishonest about creating a welcome emotional atmosphere. The two men are almost perfectly complementary, and poor Jane (Holly Hunter) — as brilliant as Aaron but still woman enough to be drawn to the hunky (and much kinder) Tom — has a terrible time trying to decide between them. She winds up, by her own choice, with neither, and the movie would be scratchily unsatisfying if it weren’t for a feel-good postlude, set a few years down the road, when all three parties have found agreeable companions. Jane’s romantic adventure was something that she had to go through, and probably something that Tom and Aaron had to go through as well: the final scene is fairly adamant about lessons learned and moving on. It is knowing this, knowing how the story works out, that makes watching it supremely interesting now. One kind of suspense — yours — is canceled, because you know the ending, and this makes room for a second, which is Jane’s. No matter how many times you’ve watched the movie, Jane doesn’t know how she’s going to wind up, and the overall filmmaking is strong enough to forestall your pitying or condescending to Jane in this ignorance. It’s strong enough to make you see the battle that intelligence and desire wage within her. Desire is essentially unethical, but intelligence presents options, and Broadcast News is as elegant a study of moral choice as I’ve ever encountered on the screen. It’s all the more powerful for being relatively ephemeral. We are, after all, talking about television broadcasts here, not Sophie’s Choice. Precious few of us, it is to be hoped, will face the latter grade of decision. But all of us, especially those who are “knowledge workers,” face Jane’s conundrum, in some form, every day of the week.

One thing that has dated blatantly in Broadcast News is Jack Nicholson’s age. He was very much in-between when this movie was made, no longer the young rake but not yet the old monster. You can’t imagine him doing The Departed or Something’s Gotta Give. You would have to wait to let him show you those.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 at 9:58 pm.